“It starts with a murder…but the truth is far more shocking”. So reads the cover blurb on the reading group’s most recent offering, The Day of the Roaring by Nina Bhadreshwar. A debut crime thriller set in Sheffield, we follow DI Diana Walker as she investigates the gruesome murder of a local headmaster. Set in 2010, the novel also explores Diana’s difficult relationship with her mother, the misogyny she experiences in the police service, her grandmother’s legal battle around the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, racism, violence against women, FGM, corruption in education….the list goes on.
In fact that was our main comment on the novel, it tried to do too much, cover too many topics, and in doing so it felt some of the themes got short changed. Our readers enjoyed being introduced to topics they had previously not known about, and several had read more about the Mau Mau uprising as a result of the novel. The crime drama story interested most of us, and we wanted to know what happened, whodunnit, and why.
Our group used the word challenging to describe the book, we found some of it quite difficult to read, and were grateful that although it was shocking, it wasn’t too graphic in its descriptions of violence. Still, the violence against women was challenging to read, and part of our discussion was around how much our tolerance of much of the bigotry, bullying and misogyny has changed in the 15 years since the novel was set (in 2010). We thought that was a clever time to set the novel, close enough to present day to allow familiarity, but far enough away for societal norms to have changed.
We liked Diana and enjoyed her grandmother MaMa. We wanted to know more about Diana’s testy relationship with her mother, and more about MaMa and her life in Kenya. The group appreciated the inclusion of the book group, but again felt there were themes there that were touched on and not explored.
Several of the group has some issues with the speech dialect used in the book. We’re old hands at reading speech written out in dialect and quite enjoy it, but it’s use in the book seemed sporadic. At times a Sheffield word would start a sentence but then the accent would die away for the rest of the character’s speech. It could also be difficult to follow who was speaking. We’d have liked the dialect to be more pronounced and clearer.
A big stumbling point for everyone in the group was due to the books being proof copies kindly provided by the publisher. As such they hadn’t been checked and edited and we did find the typos and small mistakes jarring. We were grateful to receive the books, and understand that the final published copies would be perfect, but it still impacted on our enjoyment of reading the novel.
A mixed bag for us all in all. At least one reader has passed the novel on to another reader, and we learned something new, which is always a positive!
Next month we will be holding a joint reading group session with our sister wellbeing reading group at SWFT in honour of Libraries Change Lives week. We’ll be reading Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller.
Pick up a book in the Library at GETEC or SWFT and join in!
Find out more about our reading groups here
Take a look at the blog posts for our previous reads here.
